Comes now Jim Henson, head of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas in Austin, along with his colleague, Joshua Blank, to throw a few pitchers of cold water on the prospect.
While the trend line in Texas presidential polling certainly justifies this speculation, there are good reasons not to go too far down the road toward speculating
Texas turning blue, the two of them wrote.
In a back-of-the-envelope thought experiment, they sifted through past voting performance, current voter registration figures and other political juju and concluded that a Clinton victory in the state is awfully darned unlikely.
There is good reason to believe that polling is finding Texas leaning Republican rather than the solid Republican state it has been in presidential elections for most of the last three decades, they concluded. But the change in its tilt doesnt necessarily mean its ready to fall the other direction without still more shaking at the foundations.
